Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 23 September 2025

Committee on Budgetary Oversight

Pre-Budget Engagement (Resumed)

2:00 am

Dr. Tom McDonnell:

I will follow on from that. Obviously, it takes a number of years to do an apprenticeship, so we are not remotely where we need to be on that and alongside that, because we have close to full employment, that makes it very difficult to induce people to switch over. It would be much easier to do if we had higher unemployment. It is going to be very challenging to magic up the construction workers from within the domestic economy. They are not there and it is going to be at least half a decade before we can get there.

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